“Those voices are calling for cooling drinks these warm nights, which,” the nurse declared ruefully, “I have to prepare in the hot afternoons.” Determination seized her. “Joe Curtis,” she exclaimed, “you have had enough lemonade this week to bathe in and I have carried it to you. Unless you apologize immediately you will get no more. There now.”
Before such a threat, Joe meekly surrendered and thus addressed the stern-faced nurse. “Miss Knight, after listening to your bawling out, I know that I should have called you ‘Rapper’ instead of ‘Knightie,’ and I wouldn’t have you as a sister at any price.”
The nurse tossed her head in disdain. “I don’t care to be related to a motorcyclist,” she announced.
Joe grinned at Virginia. “What did I tell you? No one cares for a motorcyclist. They have no friends, even in a hospital.”
“Why should any one care about them? Their troubles are due to their own foolishness. They are a noisy pest in the streets and they get themselves hurt and take up bed space in hospitals which might be devoted to better uses.” Miss Knight’s seriousness gave way and her eyes danced. “And they make their nurses like them in spite of it all,” she laughed as she hurried away to another patient.
Virginia watched Joe thoughtfully. “You take a strange way to show Miss Knight that you like her,” she told him. “You are always in an argument with her.”
“She starts the scrap, not I.”
“But you make her do it!”
“No,” he declared with earnestness, “she jumps on me to stir things up and give her something to talk about.”
“I don’t understand you at all, Joe. You treat Miss Knight so differently from the way you treat me. Yet, you like her,” Virginia urged.